You know that feeling you get when you haven’t done something in so long that you start to fear it a bit? Silence can be just as heavy and terrifying as it can be soft and soothing. The past four weeks have been eventful to say the least. I have lived through days that will forever be part of my making and the memories are just as sweet and memorable as the day I lived them.
I went on my first vacation, by myself, on a plane, to visit friends. I visited a place across the country that’s a complete 180 from the small city I live in. The ocean was bluer, the people more diverse and joyful, and the food was so amazing and hearty. As a young South Asian living in a very non-diverse city full of thoughts and ideologies that aren’t necessarily always welcoming, vacationing in a city that is loud and welcoming in a way I’m not used to was jarring but grounding at the same time. But at the same time lol, it did make me realize how much of a cozy oriented person I am and maybe while I like the idea of living somewhere where there’s so much to do and so much to experience, I also kind of like that small town vibe. I had bit of an identity crisis because it’s definitely more socially normal for someone in their mid-twenties to gravitate towards large cities and I thought I’d like that kind of life but I don’t think I do? I want the loud life but I also want a place where it’s quiet and my mind can get quiet.
I went to my first wedding as an “adult” and celebrated two dear friends who I’ll never forget. They made the first years few years of post-grad memorable and wholesome. I’ll forever be thankful for them. I also met so many new people who I’m excited to hang out with more!
I also finished the entirety of the ACOTAR series (except that tiny novella, I’m saving that for when I feel down in the dumps lol…or more down in the dumps than I currently am). I loved that series. I read two of the biggest books in that series during my vacation. I read one on the plane ride to see my friend and the other one on the plane ride back home. Besides loving the actual plot of the series, I loved how this series opened me up to the idea of series. It felt so comforting to just pick up a book, fly through it, and have one waiting for me afterwards. I enjoyed the feeling of not having to think of what to read next. I especially loved that comforting feeling of sticking with the same group of characters for as long as possible. When life gets tough and the thought of thinking a thought hurts, there’s comfort in removing as many decisions as possible.
A week and few days later:
Ironically, I was midway through typing the sentence “I guess now that we’ve covered the happy parts of the past few weeks, it’s time to talk about some lows” and I then proceeded to accidentally spill tea ALL over my laptop keyboard.
I think I involuntarily manifested that because as soon as I started to get ready to talk about the lows, the universe showed me that things can indeed get even lower.
So maybe, in the theme of starting anew, I’ll keep the talk about the lows short: things have been a bit difficult. The time change really messed with my lack of routine. Don’t get me wrong, I was struggling before the time change but I’ve felt so much more unbalanced afterwards. Then I couldn’t do anything on my laptop for a bit. And other things have been keeping me up at night and I’ve been going to bed around the time I used to wake up. That’s not a sustainable life for me. In conclusion, while there have been many happy things that have happened the past few weeks, I’ve also been feeling really unbalanced.
This is the time women stereotypically want to cope with the chaos of their lives by either dying their hair (not really interested in doing that) or cutting off all their hair (already involuntarily did that). So I decided to scrap my site’s theme and renovate it. The process took a bit longer than I expected and many of the nights I’d be up fighting the mental demons, I was fixing my site. I think changing one’s appearance is the default way of coping with change and chaos because it gives us back some sort of control. It’s a change that we can control and a change that we’re okay with amongst all the changes that we’re not okay with. I think I needed to fight back against this overwhelming wave of chaos and sort something out and gain back some of the control I feel like I’ve lost. And if I fix this corner of my life, then I can work up the strength to tackle the rest of the areas of my life that need addressing.
We’ve got one more week of March left which means seven more days of asking those questions we need to ask and answering them with complete honesty, not matter how much it may hurt to finally sit down so that we can move into the next quarter with nothing but the truth.
What have been some of your highs and lows?